I guess this night will go down as one of those ‘what might have been’ stories. A cold front was stretched horizontally above our area, causing favorable winds to the north (over northern New York) and west/southwest winds over our area. Had the front been a little bit lower by sunset, the winds over our area would have been more westerly, and the birds leaving New York would have been greater and heading straight for us. But that didn’t happen. Here’s the radar from sunset last night through 5:30am this morning.

Frames are every 1/2 hour for reflectivity and velocity, and every hour for the regional composite. Click on the thumbnail to view the full-sized animation.

You can actually watch the winds switch from SW –> W –> NW by checking the velocity images. Winds on the surface remain WSW, so the NW movement depicted in the images are occurring at higher altitudes. It’s tough to tease apart the birds from the noise in these images, but I feel pretty confident that some of the signal early this morning is birds entering from the NW…but probably not enough to notice anything on the ground. Tonight the winds will be northerly, and we can expect the region to undergo a heavy migration…until then, get back to work! The long weekend is over! 😉

Good Birding
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